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Murderology

Let me tell you about Murderology because it is different from any other book I’ve written and most of that comes down to the circumstances under which it was brought to life. My agent was unable to sell yet another novel of mine, this would be three in a row he couldn’t move over a course of three years and I asked him why. Basically, I wanted him to tell me what to write so we could just break the seal and get started.

Sex and serial killers. If you want to sell a book today it has to have sex in it. Sex like erotica. Then, once you have your sex, add either vampires or a serial killer. Bring me that book, he said, and I will be able to sell it.

I was dumbfounded but I sat down to do exactly that. But here’s the problem with trying to write something in someone else’s style: If you can do it, you’re probably not a very good writer or, at least, you’re not a very original one. Every writer is like a lens. You take the same light and pass it through that lens and you get something different from when it passes through other lenses. When I took the standard, breathless serial killer genre and all its clichéd tropes and passed it through my lens, something really crazy came out the other side.

Murderology turned out to be more of a parody of the serial killer genre and, while there’s a lot of talk about sex, there’s definitely no erotica. And the story is so crazy, I think of it as my Fight Club. This is a comic novel that is a real ride and, considering only two of my three first readers liked it, I would say it’s probably going to be pretty divisive, too.